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Why Bill Gates Is A Hero And Donald Trump Is A Zero

Autism is so prevalent today. I’ve been saying this for a long time, that the — I’m not against vaccination but I’m against massive vaccinations at one time in order to save doctor visits with the doctors. and frankly, a lot of people love that and some people didn’t look it. My attitude is if you spread the vaccinations over a period of time, what do we have to lose? Autism is so prevalent.

Trump has been making similar claims on Fox and Friends and on Twitter. On TwitLonger, he made the following summation of his position:

I’ve gotten many letters from people fighting autism thanking me for stating how dangerous 38 vaccines on a baby/toddler under 24 months are. It is totally insane – a baby cannot handle such tremendous trauma. Now they come up with this ridiculous study blaming obesity in the mother. The FDA should immediately stop heavy dose vaccinations and you will see a huge decrease in children with autism. What do they have to lose—nothing—but plenty to gain if I am correct. There is great dishonesty about autism!

Luckily for me, someone smarter and richer than Trump — twenty times richer – has already done the bulk of the job of correcting this statement. On national television, no less.

Cue Bill Gates, from his 2011 CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta, on the retracted paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that helped kick off the idea of a vaccine-autism link:

Gates: Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

Just to emphasize that: “an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids.” Gates, through the work of his foundation, has seen the impact that these vaccines can have. Hundreds of thousands of kids still die of measles every year worldwide because they don’t get measles vaccine. In a few countries, there are still cases of polio. If we stopped vaccinating, it would come back here. Whooping cough is making a comeback, perhaps partly because of weaknesses in the vaccine, but also because some people are choosing not to get kids their shots. Trump’s statement that we have nothing to lose by trying out giving fewer vaccines, or even changing the vaccine schedule, which makes it more likely that kids will miss shots, is simply wrong. If there were a link between vaccines and autism, we would be faced with a terrible choice: choosing whether children would get autism, or whether children would die.

Thankfully, we don’t face that choice. At one point, the worry was that overdoses of thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines, was causing autism; that preservative is no longer in routine childhood vaccines. But there are no data supporting this worry. Large studies have failed to show any signal that getting more vaccines makes it more likely that kids will be diagnosed as autistic. When I profiled Bill Gates last year, I remember him telling me that scientific proof just wasn’t enough to get rid of this connection in some people’s minds.

“Some scientific myths like the thimerosal thing are hard to get rid of entirely,” Gates said. ”You know, it’s just hard to have everybody look at the data, which couldn’t be clearer on the fact that that is not associated with the increase in autism.”

These kinds of worries hit us right in parts of our brains that have little to do with the analysis of data from scientific studies. When my kids got their shots, I remember being nervous about the autism link, even though I didn’t believe it. Because when you’re holding an infant, the thought that you might be doing something to hurt them is simply terrifying. It takes work to make it go away. But no one is helped if we keep following blind alleys. It would be better to put more effort to make sure that kids with autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed as early as possible, so that therapists can do more to help them.

On one point, I do agree with Trump:linking the rise in autism to obesity is a stretch at this point. I think most of the reporting on this topic makes us seem farther along in finding answers than we actually are. For instance, reports that we may have finally found some genetic changes that may cause autism in some kids probably went too far, as UC-Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen details here. His take: all we’ve learned is that kids with autism have more genetic mutations than those without, but we don’t know if something is causing the mutations and the autism, or if the mutations are causing the autism, or if there is some other explanation. Scientists studying autism are climbing a giant mountain and have only the tiniest handholds.

I also understand that many people don’t want to trust vaccine makers like Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, and Novartis, because they are for-profit companies and have behaved badly in the past. But trusting Trump seems like a stretch here, too. We should at least admit that medicine is more complicated than an episode of “The Apprentice.”

Update: For those who have not been following this debate closely for years, here are some studies showing that there is not a link between autism and vaccines, or the MMR vaccine in particular. The Institute of Medicine concluded that the evidence favored rejecting any relationship between MMR vaccine and autism. I’d also refer people to this study from NEJMand this one from JAMA.

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You say Americans have spent $2 billion on compensation for vaccine related medical cases. Over what time period? Per year? Since 1986? In 2010, the US medical industry grossed almost 2.6 trillion dollars. Comapred that, $2 billion is a statistical anomaly.

Recent evidence shows that the Pertussis vaccine does not last as long as previously thought. However, the outbreaks in Oregon recently also showed that vaccinated kids who did come down with whooping cough did not get as sick. Fading vaccine effectiveness is a well known condition. It is well known that vaccines don’t work on 100% of the population, and even when they do work, they don’t necessarily work at 100% effectiveness. The human immune system does not work perfectly. When I was a child I was not vaccinated for Chicken Pox, and I contracted it twice. My first infection was so very mild that my body did not fire up full antibody production. In essence, a vaccination is just a mild infection. Anyone’s immune system may choose not to go into full antibody production because of the mildness of the infection.

Peanut allergies kill about 10 people per year in the US. If there is a link between vaccination and peanut allergies then I would like to see the study. It is a tragedy that should be prevented if it can. Conversely, before worldwide vaccination programs for measles got started, the disease killed millions of children per year. That would happen again if the vaccine were no longer given routinely. Given a choice between heightened peanut allergies and loosing thousands of children per year in the US, I choose peanut allergies.

I’m not going to buy the book you are shilling, but O’Shea appears to be, among other things, drawing links to autism. The only study to show a strong link between vaccinations and autism was done by Dr Wakefield, who was selling his own vaccine to replace the conventional MMR vaccine. Wakefield has been discredited and reported as a fraud by reputable news sources for falsifying records to support his hypothesis.

Because everything ever written in a book was true. John, if you care not to use medical science and the systems we have in place, would you please do one last medical thing for all of us? Get a vasectomy so you can’t spread your stupidity into the next generation.

Vaccines do not cause the conditions they are meant to prevent (the one in a million effects of oral polio vaccine are an exception). They do not interact with compounds in food. Vaccines are a for profit industry, but many of them are not as profitable as you seem to think. I see plenty of conspiracies when I look at the drug industry. This is not one of them.

The concept that people’s immune systems are better at fighting these diseases without vaccines is just completely wrong.

I agree. I’ve seen several studies that show it’s toxic even in the amounts in our water. Also, 1% of the population will experience dermatitis etc because they are allergic to it, even in that amount in water….

Ask the 1,000′s of parents who had what seemed to be normal babies to only see their child fall under what appears to be a trance to then find later their child is autistic. Even though nobody in their family was ever diagnosed with the disease.

The medical industry is close to what wall street is. Do whatever you can to make a buck and over power an individual in court if needed. Thanks to regimes like G.W.Bush’s they have even created laws to where they can’t be sued.

I would suggest you read a book called “Evidence of Harm” by David Kirby (a journalist). He doesn’t take a side, but documents what people have done. Most notably, is the first testing done on thimerosal (the preservative used in vaccinations). In 1930, the company (Eli Lily) tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected, and declared the drug safe for humans. I won’t even go into how the patroit act had a rider put in it that Eli Lily couldn’t be sued for wrongful deaths or items pertaining to thimerosal. How can any of us trust these companies and their drugs when the people that say they are safe are on the payroll and boards of these drug companies? How can such a conflict of interests be over looked?